Burmese Light - Impressions of the Golden Land by Hans Kemp and Tom Vater Visionary World, 2013 ( buy on Amazon ) “Impressions of the Golden Land” is quite an apt subtitle for Burmese Light as this book literally brings to the table (a coffee-table, to be precise) two kinds of impressions. The visual impressions...

Tearing up the Silk Road: A Modern Journey from China to Istanbul, through Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus by Tom Coote Garnett publishing, 2012 ( buy on AMAZON ) With nine weeks on your hands, the last thing you want to do is breeze from Asia to England through the Silk Road and the...

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there...

(Picture credit: Flickr/ derekb ) This past weekend I spent a few hours nosing around the travel section at a local bookstore. With nothing much better to do in another steamy Malaysian Sunday afternoon, I got easily attracted by the air-conditioned comfort of the Temple of Vanity (i.e. one of the abundant malls). I went...

Nancy has done the impossible. And I don’t mean cycling from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina over three years with twin boys who broke the Guinness World record for youngest persons to cycle the continents. That’s entirely doable, as is clearly evident by their success. The impossible is encapsulating the scope of that epic...

Picture credit: Hans Kemp/Burmese Light Visionary World from Hong Kong is about to release "Burmese Light" , a pictorial travel book assembled by photographer Hans Kemp and travel writer Tom Vater . The project is an attempt to capture the current changing situation of Myanmar, a country that, despite its troubled past, is making waves...

Picture credit: Flickr/ United Nations Photo When I moved to Asia in 2007, I was still tied under the wheels of the Machine, back home. Everything I was doing, experiencing, and trying to translate into a piece of writing, or any other form of “artistic text”, I did so with the wish that someone, back...

Eleanor Stanford ’s memoir, Historia, Historia: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands , is out this month from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Her first book, The Book of Sleep , was published in 2008 by Carnegie Mellon Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The...

Matthew Kepnes is the author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day: Travel Cheaper, Longer, Smarter , which debuts in bookstores this week. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt , and his travel advice has been featured in the New York Times , CNN, The Guardian , Lifehacker,...

I think it is never too late or too biased to try spending a few words on the travel writing subject, as this still constitutes an activity that many vagabonds fancy to help substantiate their living on the run. Since I started writing for Vagabonding one year ago, I have more and more delved into...

By Tom Vater – published by Crimewave Press, 2012 A bunch of hippies, a rattler of a bus and the adventure of a lifetime along freely open South Asian land borders in the mid 70s are the base ingredients of “ The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu” , Tom Vater’s first novel, originally released in 2006...

In this second installment of Realities of Travel Writing, I’m continuing on the topic of getting the assignment. It bears fleshing out, as you can’t board the plane until you land the gig. So, first thing’s first. After you’ve come up with a great article idea and researched the websites, blogs, or magazines you want...

In this second in a series on the realities of being a being a travel writer, I want to mention something that is not only important to travel writing, but to the essence of good travel itself: Be open to surprising detours. Case in point: A couple years ago I received an assignment to visit...

I’m often asked about what it’s like to be a travel writer. I find that most people assume that it’s always fun and high-paying, which isn’t necessarily the case. I feel compelled to address some of these realities in this mini-series of blog posts. Unlike the life of the Matthew Hunt, the travel writer protagonist...

Dancing in the Fountain how to enjoy living abroad written by Karen McCann Now available in print and on e-reader, August 2012 “Living abroad is an opportunity to reinvent yourself that rarely exists outside the witness protection program.” ~Karen McCann From their first date, Karen and her husband-to-be, Rich talked about living abroad. Instead--after getting...

I recently got word that a new independent publisher is trying to kick the corporate media world’s bum by releasing hard hitting, pulpy noirs with Asian settings. I am talking about Crime Wave Press based in Hong Kong and brainchild of travel and Asian focused writer Tom Vater . The first two books are his...

There were a lot of comments on my last blog entry for this site, relative to the normal amount these posts receive. (“The What-ness, part 2: Choose what to lose”, can be read at /the-what-ness-part-2-choose-what-to-lose.html ). The post was about avoiding easy clichés and sterile recounting in your travel writing, and putting in the effort...

When you’re trying to write about your experience of a place, whether for yourself or an audience, it’s tempting to adopt the narrative form we were taught in school. After all, it was drilled into us for years, over and over again. Therefore it’s no surprise that when you open many a travel journal or...

We often think of the Internet as existing in the ether, not a physical, tangible place. Wired magazine writer Andrew Blum flipped that notion on its head by visiting the Internet we don't get to see: the data centers, the underwater cables, the "series of tubes" as the late U.S. senator Ted Stevens described it....

My college philosophy professor was fond of the term “what-ness.” As in, the “what-ness” of a place or feeling. Meaning, the core essence of it. Being a callow young man, I rolled my eyes and thought, “He’s nuts. That’s not even a word!” But in time I became a fan of the concept, because it...